OK GO vs EMI

OK GO has always been a band known for its inventively creative viral videos. Think back to those impeccably dressed men you witnessed on treadmills, or caught dancing in your backyard back in 2006. Well, those same impeccably dressed gentlemen have returned with a new album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, and a new video for “This Too Shall Pass,” but EMI does not want you to be able to freely share it. They have disabled the embed feature of the video on YouTube, and are in the process of suing Vimeo for allowing for an embeddable version.

Frontman Damian Kulash posted an open letter about the situation on the group’s forum Monday night, shedding some light on the issue. “We make our videos ourselves, and we keep them dirt cheap, but still, it all adds up, and it adds up to a great deal more than we have in our bank account, which is why we have a record label in the first place… Musicians need [record labels] to survive so we can use them as banks. Even bands like us who do most of our own promotion still need them to write checks every once in a while.”

Their record label, EMI/Capitol Records, gets paid a small sum every time a viewer watches one of their copyrighted works on YouTube. However, when a video is embedded on another blog, YouTube does not count those plays and EMI does not get paid. With the declining state of the current music industry, losing more money is not what the record company wants to do, even at the expense of virtually guaranteed viral marketing.

Kulash is mildly sympathetic to the plight of the record label, however, and offered up his thoughts in an interview with NewTeeVee.com:

“…I try to slam the label as little as possible. I mean, they’re in a completely impossible position. They were incredibly slow to react and definitely dug their own graves to a large extent, but that doesn’t mean that the people who are actually working at the desks at our label right now are bad people or doing the wrong thing. Most of the people we work with at the label are disgusted with their embedding policy. But it’s a big massive system that takes a long time to turn around.”

For a band that prides itself on its connections with fans and intense dedication to its art, I highly doubt that the band members really feel all that bad about the state of their record label. They most likely just need to keep up appearances so they don’t get dropped from the roster. The band could technically just repost the video under another YouTube username and provide an embed code that way, just as they have done by posting the video on Vimeo. The record label is clearly scrambling for every penny they can get, but I don’t see how preventing fans from sharing the video across social networking platforms actually helps them recoup any money. It is just drawing traffic away from YouTube, where they make money, to Vimeo, where they are not. But really, who thinks logically anymore?

Be sure to check out the video in question:

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Also, download a free MP3 of “This Too Shall Pass” on the band’s website.

iO